We encourage authors to evaluate their approaches to the above topics using the common data sets created for the shared translation task. In addition to scientific papers, we will also feature two shared tasks.

SHARED TRANSLATION TASK

The first is a shared translation task which will examine translation between the following language pairs:

English-German and German-English

English-French and French-English

English-Spanish and Spanish-English

German-Spanish and Spanish-German

English-Czech and Czech-English

English-Hungarian and Hungarian-English

Participants may submit translations for any or all of the language directions. In addition to the common test sets the workshop organizers will provide optional training resources, including a newly expanded release of the Europarl corpora and out-of-domain corpora.

All participants who submit entries will have their translations evaluated. We will evaluate translation performance by human judgment. To facilitate the human evaluation we will require participants in the shared task to manually judge some of the submitted translations.

SHARED EVALUATION TASK

The second task is a shared evaluation task. Participants in this task will submit automatic evaluation metrics for machine translation, which will be assessed on their ability to:

Rank systems on their overall performance on the test set

Rank systems on a sentence by sentence level

Participants in the shared translation task will submit translation results for a set of a few thousand sentences. Their system outputs will be distributed to participants in the shared evaluation task along with the reference translations. The translations will be ranked with automatic evaluation metrics. We will measure the correlation of automatic evaluation metrics with the human judgments.

PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Submissions will consist of regular full papers of max. 8 pages, formatted following the
ACL 2008 guidelines.
In addition, shared task participants will be invited
to submit short papers (max. 4 pages) describing their systems or their evaluation metrics.
Both submission and review processes will be handled electronically.

We encourage individuals who are submitting research papers to evaluate their approaches using the training resources provided by this workshop and past workshops, so that their experiments can be repeated by others using these publicly available corpora.

INVITED TALK

Abstract: As the fields of natural language processing and machine learning mature, the gap between the mathematical equations that we write when we model a problem statistically and the manner in which we implement these equations in NLP applications is widening. This talk reviews some of the challenges that we face when searching for best solutions in large-scale statistical applications, such as machine translation, and the effect that the ignoring of these challenges is having on end-to-end results. It also presents recent developments that have the potential to impact positively a wide range of applications where parameter estimation and search are critical.